[Mailman-Developers] A bit of perspective ....

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 13:53, Jeff Warnica wrote:

> LDAP may be a better data[base|sink] for configuration data then SQL. It may be
> harder to work with (only because less people have experience with it), and it
> may be less usefull to a lot of sites (everyone has MySQL installed, not so for
> LDAP), but preference storage is a common use for LDAP. For sites who already
> have LDAP deployed, you can leverage the existing authentication data. LDAP
> stores "objects", SQL "rows"...

Let me take a few moments to describe what I'm looking for, or at least
how I'm viewing the system.  This is an ideal, and we'll see how close
we can get.

Just as we don't tie Mailman to a specific MTA, I'd like to not tie
Mailman3 to a specific database/persistence technology.  It should be
possible to back MM3 against LDAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, BerkeleyDB, or
some combination depending on existing infrastructure.  MM3 will come
out of the box with /something/ because I still strongly believe in that
philosophy.  But it should be possible to say, replace the
IAuthentication implementation with one that links users to your
corporate LDAP database.

This is why we need solid interfaces defining what information MM3 wants
to store and retrieve, how to play nicely with transactions, and how to
define data sources (and their options).  We need to figure out the
right breakdown of storage requirements.

The hope then is that we can define these interfaces, and then the MySQL
experts can go and implement their version of it, as can the BerkeleyDB
experts, the ZODB experts, and the LDAP experts.

-Barry